Mastering LexisNexis Diligence: How to Check and Correct Your Profile

LexisNexis Diligence, a service within the international information services company LexisNexis, allows you to check a company or individual for key compliance risks and assess their reliability.

An entity profile in LexisNexis Diligence contains the following information:

• A comprehensive set of Internet publications about the company or person in different languages, covering any period since the 1990s and including international, national, and regional sources.
• Company legal information, including ownership structure, job structure, and data on subsidiaries and affiliates.
• Documents on the company's financial position, such as financial statements and credit history.
• Inclusion of the company or person on sanctions and "blacklists."
• Politically Exposed Person (PEP) status.
• History of litigation involving the company or person.

LexisNexis offers keyword screening (company name/person name) across all Internet sources in all languages (media publications, social media), registration databases, court cases, and patents, as well as a wide range of international sanctions and "blacklists."

The main advantage of LexisNexis compared to similar products is its extensive collection of open sources in nearly all languages, including retrospective data. It also offers sentiment analysis of messages, allowing for a systematic study of negative and positive publications.

Furthermore, key topics are highlighted within publications of the same tone. For example, all publications related to legal proceedings or corruption scandals can be considered separately.

Another distinctive feature of LexisNexis is its depth of analysis, as the system can accumulate information dating back to the 1990s.

Furthermore, news that gets into LexisNexis is likely to remain in the system, even if it has been removed from Google, Yandex, and other resources. Even publications that have been de-indexed and removed from search results in accordance with the "right to be forgotten" remain in the LexisNexis database.

The LexisNexis Diligence system is most often used to conduct due diligence procedures—a comprehensive check of a company, person, or investment object from a legal, economic, and financial standpoint. It aims to identify all possible “red flags” for an organization or investor.

Unlike competing risk assessment systems such as World-Check and Dow Jones Risk & Compliance, LexisNexis Diligence is the most expensive product due to its larger array of data and more in-depth analysis. Consequently, the system is usually used by large companies for whom checking a counterparty, partner, or client, as well as a large-scale transaction or investment, poses particularly high risks.

The LexisNexis risk assessment system isn't limited to economic criminals, PEPs, or companies and individuals involved in high-profile court cases. The database contains information on more than 80 million companies worldwide—a massive amount of data that is updated and supplemented daily.

The high-risk companies and persons in LexisNexis include:

• PEPs, their relatives, and business partners
• Persons who do not have PEP status but are associated with government agencies and state-owned companies, as well as sanctioned persons and organizations
• Participants in any illegal activity, from fraud and money laundering to corruption schemes
• Persons from sanctions and other "blacklists"
• Persons involved in legal proceedings and reputational scandals
• Violators of industry standards, corporate norms, information security policies, etc.

The LexisNexis system is used by many organizations worldwide as part of the standard KYC (“know your customer”) procedure, preventing money laundering, financial terrorism, and fraudulent schemes. Therefore, Avagard Global specialists recommend performing a profile check in the following cases:

• Before starting cooperation with foreign banks: opening an account, conducting large transactions, etc.
• Before submitting a request to migration services for obtaining a residence permit, citizenship, or purchasing real estate abroad.
• Before starting cooperation with real estate and legal companies for the purpose of purchasing real estate or investing in real estate abroad.
• Before opening a company abroad, entering foreign markets with your brand, and searching for new partners in the international arena.
• Before a large investment transaction abroad.
• If it is necessary to obtain international permits and licenses for activities.

With a high degree of probability, in all these cases, financial, state, and private commercial organizations will conduct a check of the company or a specific person through LexisNexis. This is not only the desire of the company or institution itself to protect itself from possible risks, but in some cases, it is also a mandatory requirement at the legislative level, such as in banking compliance, where this is a mandatory procedure for checking a potential client.

If a company or person's profile in LexisNexis Diligence contains information that can be considered a "red flag," this may lead to serious negative consequences:

• Denial of banking services from foreign banks or restrictions on financial transactions, international transactions, and account opening; freezing of funds on deposits.
• Difficulties, restrictions, delays, and even failure to implement international projects.
• Refusal to issue visas, residence permits, and citizenship in foreign countries.
• Difficulties with acquiring real estate abroad.
• Difficulties and refusal to register a company in a foreign country.
• Difficulties and refusal to obtain international licenses and certificates.
• Refusal to appoint to a management position in a foreign company.
• Difficulties in finding and concluding contracts with foreign companies, as well as a deterioration of relations with them.

Before an important deal, transaction, or entry into a foreign market, it is recommended to analyze the company or person's profile in the main risk assessment databases—LexisNexis Diligence, World-Check, and Dow Jones Risk & Compliance—to assess compliance risks that may become an obstacle to working at the international level.

Avagard Global specialists can quickly check a company or person's profile in the LexisNexis Diligence system (on average, we provide a report within an hour) and offer an effective strategy for correcting the profile (including for deactivating PEP status), based on the specific situation and the client's request.

Like other risk assessment databases, LexisNexis Diligence accumulates large amounts of information from open sources, the reliability of which is not verified. A company or person's profile may contain outdated or unreliable information, errors in identifying people (for example, people with the same last name), or incorrect translations of publications from the Internet. Therefore, correcting your LexisNexis profile without removing information from the Internet and without creating a positive digital profile has a low success rate.